ok so ive decided to come back to finish off my HoM, but for some reason i cant for the life of me work out, the game wont stop crashing.

My screen goes black and it gets stuck in a sound loop and resets itself, this happens completly randomly, sometimes within 5 min but somtimes it can run for a couple of hours no problem. seems to happen alot more in some places than others, specifically any sort of pvp (almost insta crashes it) and kurzick areas, but will happen anywhere and has even happened jsut logging in a couple of times.

heres what really confuses me though, im running a fairly new install of windows 7 x64 with the latest drivers and assumed there was some driver conflict or such

To try and solve this i set up a dual boot with windows xp and installed nothing but the basic drivers for the mobo, gfx, and audio, and this clean install still has the exact same problem.

So anyone got any ideas? cos ive tried just about everything i can think of and this is really starting to wind me up :@

also system specs are amd 64 x2 5600+, 4gb ram, geforce 9600gt, have redownloaded gw.dat, nothings oc'd, and im able to play new games like the witcher2 non stop for hours so doubt its a hardware problem

temps do seem a little high, went up to 70 when it didnt crash, but since it crashes before the temp can rise i doubt thats the issue, also checking on the witcher 2 the temp went up to 82 and that didnt crash :/

As for the other 2 replies.... my card and memory are obvously not broken or id be having problems with everything... not just gw u.u

As for the other 2 replies.... my card and memory are obvously not broken or id be having problems with everything... not just gw u.u

That is not obvious. It's possible that there are sections of your video card that are only used (or used more often) by GW for certain graphics features.
That area of the video card could be broken - more particularly, it could have a thermal fault that only shows up when it warms up. (Which is not the same as overheating.)
One way to find out would be to temporarily replace the 9600gt with the same or a similar nVidia card (8800gt, etc.) and see if the problem persists.

Guild wars,while not stressing and therefor heating the card as high as some games,is very sensitive to heat in my experience.

Guild Wars is very good for finding hardware faults overall.

To OP: The tests you have done pretty much ensure that it's not a software fault. You can try a BIOS update on the mobo but i don't think it will help.
Then it's just to replace part by part to see if there is any change.

Does gw.exe spit out a error log? think it's in the gws main folder or documents/guild wars.

While it certainly sounds like a video card issue, you should rule out a possible sound hardware/driver problem. If GW is running with 3D audio or EAX hardware, uncheck both options and/or disable sound completely. There are also command line switches you can use for troubleshooting various hardware issues (dsound, dx8, nosound, sndasio, sndwinmm, etc.).

I am going to assume when you reinstalled under Windows XP, you did an -image build of the gw.dat file instead of copying the file over.

well ive played for a few hours now on my 7950gt and it hasnt crashed in any of the places it used to, so i assume its the card, but ive never heard of a hardware fault that only effects 1 game, and an old one at that ;s very strange... will swtich the 9600 back in later and see if it starts crashing again

ive never heard of a hardware fault that only effects 1 game, and an old one at that ;s very strange...

Well, at this point you can only say it affects 1 game that you've tried. GW may be old, but it's been upgraded with newer graphics features as time has gone by. Which is why most graphic problems show up in EotN and Nightfall.